He said: I wasn’t panicking with the rest of them. I know I should’ve been. But I wasn’t. I kept working on the plan even without backing. Kept refining the canister mixture. It was like I knew more every day about how it should work, what the little niggles were. I was having six breakthroughs a day. They’d all expected me to go nuts. A— kept saying, Are you sleeping, are you okay, are you taking any Class As, you know you can tell me. But I wasn’t taking anything. I was sleeping like a baby. I was looking at those guys on the slab and something in me was like, I know you, I know this.
He said, Told M— that. Huge mistake. She was like, Oh my God, you’re drinking, aren’t you. You’re on amphetamines. You are on coke. You are on amphetamines and coke. I was all, Yeah … Coke Zero. She didn’t laugh. I laughed.
He said, I guess I’ve always thought any pun was automatically funny.
After a while he said, Problem was the electricity guys were all, look, we sympathise but we cannot keep diverting three percent of the country’s electricity to your vats. He was a nice guy. The health board man was a dickhead though. Kept saying we had to dispose of the bodies on site, had to do it now, could we liquefy, could we put the fluid in a concrete chamber and bury it. You would’ve fucking loved that. I was like piss off, those are our friends, we need to treat them with respect. I mean … I guess it was me saying stuff like that, which was worrying A—。 G— kept saying I was fine, but he was the voice in the wilderness. G— always thought anything I did or said was fine. Not necessarily right, but fine.
And then out of nowhere they said, No more prep. We’re shutting you guys down tonight, lights off. And we knew that out of the cans the bodies would degrade immediately. We only had the demo cans; the mass-produced ones were made in a Five Eyes factory in Shenzhen. No question of getting any of the corpses that far. I had to let them go. I went around to everyone, talking to my favourites—I know it was weird having favourites, but let’s bloody face it, I’d gone weird—not even saying goodbye, just saying it’ll be fine, hang on for me, kia kaha, kia māia. C— made appeal after appeal after appeal. No dice. They shut down our power to the vats one night, one minute after six. We were all there, waiting, when they turned them off.
He fell silent, and she prompted— “What happened, Lord?”
He smiled out over the hillside, over the flat plains and the twisted rubbish, a strange fleeting thing with teeth.
“Most of the bodies got the melt, like we thought they would,” he said. “Damaged beyond repair. Their brains liquefied almost immediately. But, Harrow … all the ones I touched, all the ones I loved … they stayed incorrupti
DAY TWO
MUSH FOR BREAKFAST—HONESTY’S JOB GOES TERRIBLY WRONG—THE CITY HAS A WORSE DAY—CAMILLA-AND-PALAMEDES—“KEEP HER HOME TONIGHT”—FOUR DAYS UNTIL THE TOMB OPENS.
7
NONA’S DREAM CUT OFF ABRUPTLY. Something wet and heavy and awful had been dropped on her from above, right on her face, splattering drops everywhere. She squealed so loudly that someone above them stamped on the floor, at which point she had to stop squealing. Camilla was inflexible: she had pressed the button, and she had said, “Start.”
Nona closed her eyes so hard that she could see bright lights at the fronts, little lightning patterns.
“It’s the sitting part. My feet are in the nice water, the safe water. The water’s in my boots. My socks are full of it. I’m talking to her but I can’t see her face. I tried to, Cam, but it’s what always happens, I don’t manage to look at it, it just doesn’t work.”
“That’s fine. Keep going.”
“We have a talk.”
“What do you talk about?”
“I don’t know. I can’t really understand. I hear the words. Sometimes I open my mouth and words come out and I know I’m talking.”
“Sensations? What are you touching?”
“I’m touching her hands. She’s touching my hands. But in the dream it’s always my hands, remember, Cam, I’m touching my own hands but they’re not mine.”
The pencil scribbled furiously.
“Okay. I know how it is. Keep going.”
“There’s eyes all around us, red eyes. In the darkness. I remember this time, they’re red.”
“Do you have any thoughts?”
“Yes,” said Nona. “I’m hungry. In the dream. Really hungry.”
The pencil stilled.